Martyr’s daughter in Twitter war with Sehwag, Randeep Hooda

New Delhi: A Kargil martyr’s daughter whosesocial media campaign against the ABVP has gone viral, got caught up in a Twitter war today with ex-cricketer Virendra Sehwag and actor Randeep Hooda who called her a “political pawn”.

24-year-old Gurmehar Kaur, a Delhi University student, had started the campaign ‘I am not afraid of ABVP’, following the violence at Ramjas college. The campaign went viral and received a massive support from students of various universities.

She posted her pictures on Facebook holding different placards including ‘I am not afraid of ABVP’ and ‘Pakistan did not kill my father but war did’.

While the literature student’s classmates and peers started sharing the post, prompting students from various universities across the country to change their profile pictures with similar placards, Sehwag shared an image of his holding a placard saying, “I did not score two triple centuries. My bat did.” While many Twitter users criticised Sehwag for comparing a cricket match to a war, many others including Randeep Hooda cheered Sehwag for his remark, saying, “She (Gurmehar) is being made a pawn.”

“Really sweet of you to encourage the hate I’ve been receiving. Makes me feel happy that I adored your work 🙂 Pawn? I can think. I don’t support violence perpetuated on students? Is that so wrong (sic),” Kaur said in a series of tweets in reply to Hooda’s comment.

The twitterati reacted negatively to the actor’s remark prompting him to get into a damage control mode.

“What’s sad is that the poor girl is being used as political pawn…It absolutely wrong..have a feeling it’s not limited to that in interpretation (sic)” he tweeted.

“Don’t call me a Martyrs (sic) daughter if that bothers you. I never claimed anything otherwise. You can call me Gurmehar,” she tweeted.

Kaur, daughter of Kargil martyr Captain Mandeep Singh has approached the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) alleging that she has received “rape threats” allegedly from members of the ABVP after she initiated the campaign against the RSS’ student wing.

Ramjas college had last week witnessed large-scale violence between members of the Left-affiliated AISA and the ABVP.

The genesis of the clash was an invite to JNU students Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid to address a seminar on ‘Culture of Protests’ which was withdrawn by the college authorities following opposition by the ABVP.